My Western Digital
drive went from intermittantly bad to intermittantly good,
so I replaced it with a venerable Quantum 850Mb that has
been in almost continuous use for the past 5 years. Sadly,
the software I use every day consumes more than 850Mb, and
NFS mounting the drive in my server was just too slow, so I
bought a new Maxtor 160Gb. This was a completely ridiculous
purchase considering that I barely used the 10Gb capacity of
the drive that died, but with things like CRPM and the CBDTPA
looming, I thought I should get the largest drive I could
afford while unrestricted drives are available. So that's
in the server and the server's 60Gb drive is in my desktop.
The kernel only sees 137Gb of the drive's capacity -
apparently I need a new controller to see the entire 160Gb.
Sigh.

Work has been interesting lately, with talk of a merger with
"a medium sized Montreal computer services firm". I know
the name of the firm but it hasn't been released publically.
This has led to a good deal of Fear and Uncertainty at work.

I am currently trying to eliminate the need to restart X
between users for our software.
This is required to disconnect all X clients and generate a
new MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key for the new user. Killing all X
clients without restarting is easy, but generating a new key
seems to be impossible. The documentation led me to believe
that you could delete the key from the .Xauthority file,
shared between client and server, then add a new one, but
doing so does NOT
remove it from the server's access list, which seems to only
get read at startup. X11R6 defines a security
extension that allows you to generate and remove keys.
But generating a key does not add it to the X
server's list, and you can't even do so manually, so the
XSecurityGenerateAuthorization
function seems nothing more than a cumbersome
PRNG. Ah, but with the ..RemoveAuthorization function I
could generate a few thousand keys before the Xserver
starts, dole them out one at a time to users, and revoke old
keys when the user logs out, right? Well yes, except that
Revoke requires an auth_in identifier for the key
that is only available from Generate, which generates keys
I can't use! Finally, I thought of a
kludge: X has an -audit option that prints a message when
clients connect and disconnect. I could watch for "invalid"
clients and kill them. Sadly, an exhausive search of the X
documentation reveals no way to translate the number -audit
prints into something actually useful, like a Window XID.
If I am wrong about any of this, please let me
know, but after a lot of experimentation it really
looks that way.

My USB DAC project is progressing slowly. I need to etch a
circuit board for the USB
controller since it's surface mount. For practice, I
have been trying to etch
a 24Cxx EEPROM programmer, but many of the traces end up
being too thin. For something as simple as the programmer,
I can retouch them with a resist pen, but the USB controller
board is too complex for that. Also, PCB is
possibly the most user-surly application I have ever used.
Very few commands work as documented, and many don't work at
all. Several times, I have been reduced to randomly
pressing function keys until I select the tool I want to
use. If there was a suitable Free vector graphics program I
would use that instead, but I haven't been able to find one.

On a sadder note, I haven't worked on the
Polegame in so long that it should be
declared legally dead. For now.